Introduction

The Ubuntu developers are moving quickly to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the Open Source community has to offer. The Ubuntu 13.04 Release is the next version of Ubuntu.

Get Ubuntu 13.04

Upgrading from Ubuntu 12.10

To upgrade from Ubuntu 12.10 on a desktop system:

Open Software Sources.

Press Alt+F2 and type in "update-manager" (without the quotes) into the command box.

Update Manager should open up and tell you: New distribution release '13.04' is available.

Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions.

To upgrade from Ubuntu 12.10 on a server system:

Install the update-manager-core package if it is not already installed.

Launch the upgrade tool with the command sudo do-release-upgrade.

Follow the on-screen instructions.

Note that the server upgrade will use GNU screen and automatically re-attach in case of e.g. dropped connection problems.

Offline upgrade options via alternate CDs are no longer offered for Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server. Please ensure you have network connectivity to one of the official mirrors or to a locally accessible mirror and follow the instructions above.

Upgrading from other releases

Users of other Ubuntu releases need to upgrade first to 12.10, and then to 13.04.

Ubuntu downloader for Windows discontinued

Due to various bugs in Wubi that have not been addressed in time for the final release, the Ubuntu team will not be releasing the Wubi installer with 13.04. You can read more about this decision here. Users who wish to try out Ubuntu without repartitioning a Windows system are encouraged to use a live system instead, booted from either a DVD or a USB disk.

Support lifespan reduced

Ubuntu 13.04 will only be supported for 9 months. Previous non-LTS releases were supported for 18 months. For more information, please read the announcements here or here.

New features in 13.04

Updated Packages

As with every new release, packages--applications and software of all kinds--are being updated at a rapid pace. Many of these packages came from an automatic sync from Debian's unstable branch; others have been explicitly pulled in for 13.04 Raring Ringtail.

For a list of all packages being accepted for 13.04 Raring Ringtail, please subscribe to raring-changes.

Linux kernel 3.8.8

Unity 7

Unity 7 brings a lot of performance improvements, reduced memory consumption and a great number of small UI fixes to bring a better overall shell experience. Those are like being typo-tolerant in the dash when searching for an application, using the mouse scroll wheel on a launcher icon to switch between applications or better available third party devices handling. You will notice as well some new icons themes to continue on lead of bringing design as the central Ubuntu experience.

You will notice that only one workspace is available by default on any new installation. If you want to bring back workspaces, you can find an option in the Appearance panel of System Settings under the Behavior tab. You can as well enable "Show desktop" button on the Launcher.

Upstart 1.8

This release provides a new bridge, the upstart-file-bridge(8) that allows jobs to react to filesystem changes. For example, to have a job start when a particular file is created:

start on file FILE=/var/log/foo.log EVENT=create

Or to start a job when a file matching a glob pattern is deleted:

start on file FILE=/var/app/*.foo EVENT=delete

See upstart-file-bridge(8) and file-event(7) for further details.

Additionally, a new upstart-monitor(8) tool is available that allows event flows to be observed in real-time. This tool can run as a graphical or console application.

Core

Less Java dependencies: e.g. more Wizards available even in the default install

moved completely from Python 2.6 to Python 3.3 internally

PDF Import, the Presenter Console, and the Python Scripting Provider are core features now

dropping legacy binfilter and a lot of obsolete UNO-API interfaces

Writer

The "Apply Style" combo box in the toolbar now features previews of the styles to choose.

Import ink annotations from DOCX and RTF documents

Import / export support for native RTF math expressions

Calc

Various performance improvements of ODS document import

Increased size limit on (uncompressed) ODF documents from 2Gb to 4Gb

XML Source dialog to quickly import arbitrary XML content

Impress/Draw

Impress Remote control for controling presentations via Bluetooth/Wifi from a Smartphone

Import for MS Publisher files

Import for _all_ Visio file formats, even MS Office 2013

various PPTX import fixes

hyperlinks/fields wrapping

RTL support for the Presenter Console

Base

Native support (mork driver) for accessing Thunderbird address books

CUPS 1.6.2 and cups-filters 1.0.34

We had already switched to CUPS 1.6.x in Quantal (12.10) but had to apply a huge, awkward Ubuntu-specific patch to avoid regressions. Now we are up to all new standards without needing to do anything Ubuntu-specific.

Most important change here is the way how network printing works. Formerly, a CUPS-specific mechanism was used. The server broadcasted information about the printers it shares and the clients listen to these broadcasts making the printers available on the client side, looking like local print queues for the applications.

Recently, the Printer Working Group (PWG), an association of printer and software industry for developing standards related to digital printing, has created a standard for broadcasting information about shared printers. This standard is broadcasting the information via Bonjour, a protocol also used for many other network services, like shared files systems, screens, music/video servers, ...

CUPS has adopted this standard in 1.6.x, but only broadcasts and does not listen to broadcasts of CUPS daemons (or generally print servers using Bonjour) on other machines, letting remote printers not automatically get available locally. CUPS also dropped the old broadcasting protocol without transition period.

To overcome the problems and keeping network printing as easy as before (this is why 10 years ago the distros switched to CUPS) the cups-filters project of OpenPrinting introduced cups-browsed, an extra daemon which by default listens to Bonjour broadcasts of remote CUPS daemons (of IPP printers coming soon) and automatically creates local print queues pointing to the shared printers making pure CUPS 1.6.x networks working out-of-the-box.

If your network still contains machines running CUPS 1.5.x and older, cups-browsed also has legacy support for the old CUPS broadcasting, browsing (listening), and BrowsePoll. Please see the comments in /etc/cups/cups-browsed.conf, edit the file appropriately, and restart cups-browsed ("sudo restart cups-browsed") or reboot. When upgrading to Raring, BrowsePoll directives are overtaken from CUPS to cups-browsed automatically.

For everyone developing embedded or mobile systems based on Ubuntu, the CUPS package is split up into more binary packages to get a minimum client-only printing stack, of the packages cups-daemon, libcups2, and cups-browsed, occupying only ~1 MB. This only listens for Bonjour broadcasts (legacy CUPS broadcasts and BrowsePoll optional) of remote CUPS servers and makes the printers available locally. No drivers and filters for locally connected printers are available then.

Another thing to mention which was available before but never told about in release notes: When sharing local printers they are automatically available also for Apple's iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod touch).

Python 3.3

We eventually intend to ship only Python 3 with the Ubuntu desktop image, not Python 2. The Ubuntu 13.04 image continues this process, although we will not be able to convert everything to Python 3 for Ubuntu 13.04 final image.

If you have your own programs based on Python 2, fear not! Python 2 will continue to be available (as the python package) for the foreseeable future. However, to best support future versions of Ubuntu you should consider porting your code to Python 3. Python/3 has some advice and resources on this.

General

Automatic Apport crash reporting has been enabled by default again to catch problems early on. It now checks for duplicates on the client side, which will avoid uploading debug data and creating Launchpad bug reports unnecessarily in many cases now.

Software Updater

Software Updater in 13.04 has a simplified details panel that most prominently shows applications and manually-installed packages. Libraries and packages that belong to the base system are collected under a single item.

Ubuntu

Upstart User Sessions (technology preview)

This Ubuntu release includes a "tech preview" of Upstart User Sessions, which allow Upstart to supervise a user's desktop session. This feature is disabled by default for Ubuntu 13.04, but can be manually enabled for testing.

To enable Upstart User Sessions for all users:

Uncomment "ubuntu" in file /etc/upstart-xsessions.

Logout of any desktop sessions.

Login to the default Unity session.

To disable, simply comment out "ubuntu", logout and log back in again.

To see details of the running Upstart session, either echo $UPSTART_SESSION to see the D-Bus address the Session Init process is listening to, or run the following command which lists the process id of the Upstart session along with the value of $UPSTART_SESSION:

$ initctl list-sessions

The normal suite of Upstart commands is available (such as initctl, start, and stop). For example, to list all session jobs, run:

$ initctl list

To list system jobs from within a user session, run one of the following two commands:

$ initctl --system list
$ sudo initctl list

Session jobs are read from /usr/share/upstart/sessions/ and $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/upstart/ (or $HOME/.config/upstart if $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is not set).

Session job output is logged to $XDG_CACHE_HOME/upstart/ (or $HOME/.cache/upstart/ if $XDG_CACHE_HOME is not set).

See init(5) for full details.

Friends

Social networking for 13.04 is now handled by the Friends service, which replaces the backend Gwibber provided in previous Ubuntu releases. There is no transition required, if you have social networking accounts setup in Ubuntu Online Accounts, the Friends service will just work. The Gwibber lens in Unity has been replaced with a Friends lens and works in much the same way. The Gwibber client application is no longer included by default, for similar functionality friends-app can be installed from Software Center.

Ubuntu Server

OpenStack Grizzly

Ubuntu 13.04 includes the Grizzly release of Openstack. OpenStack projects supported in 13.04 include: Nova, Glance, Swift, Keystone, Horizon, Cinder and Quantum. Ceilometer is also included in 13.04 in Ubuntu Universe.

Juju

The initial release (1.10.0) of the Go rewrite of Juju ('juju-core' package) is available in the -backports repository, this package is co-installable with the 0.7 version.

You can revert to the default (0.7) version by using the following:

$ sudo update-alternatives --set juju /usr/lib/juju-0.7/bin/juju

or to the new 1.10.0 release using:

$ sudo update-alternatives --set juju /usr/lib/juju-1.10.0/bin/juju

Please note that the 1.10.0 (Go version) release is not yet end-user feature complete compared to 0.7 - for example, the LXC local provider is not yet implemented in 1.10.0; if you install both you will get 0.7 by default.

MAAS

Ubuntu 13.04 includes the latest MAAS release (1.3). This new upstream release includes various bug fixes and improvements in comparison to older MAAS releases. New features include:

Customizable kernel command lines for each node via tags.

Installation path for Image Based Installations.

Improved IPMI detection, with support most recent iLO versions.

Support for Multiple Juju Environments (one per MAAS user).

Simple Streams

There is now machine formated JSON data describing all downloadable content for Ubuntu cloud images. The data format is called "simple streams", and can be found at http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/releases/streams/ . There is a sample client included in Ubuntu in the 'simplestreams' package. The client can be used to keep cloud or local downloads in sync with what is available from Ubuntu.

Ceph 0.56.4

Ubuntu 13.04 includes the latest Ceph Bobtail LTS release (0.56.4). OpenStack Keystone integration has been implemented in the RADOS Gateway for this release, providing a drop-in replacement for Swift.

MongoDB 2.2.4

Ubuntu 13.04 includes MongoDB 2.2.4; for this release SSL support has been enabled to support secured use of MongoDB (primarily to support Juju 2.0). The ARM support has also been improved during the 13.04 development cycle.

This release of MongoDB will also be provided as an official backport for 12.04 and 12.10.

OpenvSwitch 1.9.0

Ubuntu 13.04 includes the latest stable release of OpenvSwitch 1.9.0, featuring full upstream support for Linux 3.8. As of this release, the bridge compatibility module is officially deprecated - users should start planning to migrate away from this feature. For full details of this release please see the upstream release notes.

Ubuntu GNOME

In coordination with the Ubuntu Desktop Team, we have decided to stick with GNOME 3.6 for Ubuntu 13.04. For an overview of what's new in GNOME 3.6, please see the Release Notes.

The GNOME3 PPA offers an early look at GNOME 3.8 for Ubuntu. Please note that you need to do a dist-upgrade instead of a regular upgrade or else GDM or GNOME Shell won't run after upgrading. In case of problems, please make yourself familiar with ppa-purge before using the GNOME3 PPAs.

There are some additional GNOME 3.8 apps in the GNOME3 Staging PPA but these apps have known bugs, some of which are serious or critical bugs.

The other apps are still available for install; they just aren't included in the default install.

Known issues

As is to be expected, at this stage of the release process, there are some significant known bugs that users may run into with the Ubuntu 13.04 release. The ones we know about at this point (and some of the workarounds), are documented here so you don't need to spend time reporting these bugs again:

Boot, installation and post-install

When using installer to upgrade or reinstall an existing installation with encrypted swap, the installer may fail to reuse the partition. A warning will be shown, however the installation can be completed. The installed system will not have swap activated and users are advised to recreate swap on their systems. Please see advice about adding and activating swap at: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq (LP: #1172002)

Installs on very small memory systems may fail to start or exit without completing with no error. It is recommended that swap be created before install for such systems. Please see advice about adding and activating swap at: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq (LP: #1172161)

When using unattended reboots (preseeded), casper will still wait for ENTER to be preseed by the user. This can be worked around by calling "sed -i 's/eject -p -m.*/&; [ "$prompt" ] || return 0/' /etc/init.d/casper" before rebooting the machine (as a late_command for example). (LP: #1172653)

In rare circumstances the 'Next' button on the installer 'Install Type' screen is non-functional. This is intermittent and may be resolved by hitting 'Back' and retrying. (LP: #1172572)

Migration

Graphics and Display

Desktop

The official Google Chrome installer is built against libudev0 instead of the libudev1 available in Ubuntu 13.04. This should be fixed with Chrome 28 which is still in testing. We recommend that you install the open source chromium-browser from the Ubuntu Software Center until Google releases the fix for this issue. (Google: #226002)

Kernel

There are reports of non-functional HDMI audio on various machines, even with proprietary drivers. In some cases analog built-in audio is affected too. Typically the the audio device does not show up in sound settings at all. (LP: #1169984)

Ubuntu Server

OpenStack Nova includes a new component, nova-conductor, which is used over RPC by nova-compute nodes instead of all compute nodes directly accessing the underlying nova database. nova-conductor is typically deployed separately to nova-compute - this needs to be done manually during the upgrade process. LP: #1168757

MAAS

Ubuntu GNOME

There are two Online Accounts entries in System Settings. One is the GNOME tool which you can use for Contacts, Documents, and Evolution. The other is Ubuntu's tool for Empathy, Gwibber, Shotwell, and if you install it, Unity. (1040193)

For a listing of more known issues, please refer to the Raring Ringtail bug tracker in Launchpad.

Reporting bugs

It should come as no surprise that this release of Ubuntu 13.04 contains other bugs. Your comments, bug reports, patches and suggestions will help fix bugs and improve the quality of future releases. Please report bugs using the tools provided.

If you want to help out with bugs, the Bug Squad is always looking for help.